Apples – for bobbing and fortune telling

Halloween is quite a fruit-fest all in all. There are apples are smothered in toffee to be eaten on a stick. Pumpkins can be carved up into a scary face for a lantern. And then here there is the game of apple bobbing. Or apple dooking as it started life in Scotland. To dook means to dip something into something. ‘Dook’ then evolved into ‘dunk’ (as in dunking a digestive biscuit into a mug of hot chocolate that has been laced with just a tot of rum).

Whether you call it apple dunking, dooking or bobbing the game can be disproportionately fun for how straightforward it is.

Those with inquisitive romantic natures can take advantage of the celt’s beliefs in the prophetic qualities of apples at this time of year. You need to peel the skin from an apple that you won whilst dooking – you really have to manage to get it all off in one strip without breaking or else this definitely won’t work. Then throw the length of peel over your shoulder and as it falls to the ground it will form the initial of the name of your one true love. The peel will probably end up falling in the kind of way that you could convincingly argue a case for it being any initial that suits. Just don’t blame me if the peel does reveal a letter that sets the cats amongst the pigeons.